Despite the development of sophisticated and powerful compacting machinery it remains a time consuming and labor intensive chore to adequately compact material such as trash, earth, or asphalt at work sites such as landfills, construction sites, roads and the like. The material to be compacted, for example trash or waste in a landfill, is typically spread over the site in an uncompacted state and must be repeatedly traversed by a compactor until it is compressed to a predetermined desired degree of compaction. A common type of compacting machinery includes one or more heavy compacting wheels or rollers which compact the material in their path. Success in achieving the desired degree of compaction of the material on the site is measured, for example, by the number of passes a compacting wheel makes over a given area or by the elevational change from the uncompacted level.
Until now compacting operations have largely been monitored and controlled by the machinery operators and supervisors on an intuitive basis, and with the use of static site surveys and physical markers to measure and monitor the compacting operation and the overall topography of the site. For example, after empirically determining the number of passes needed to compact the site material to a desired degree of compaction, the operator drives the compacting machinery back and forth over the site, gauging by memory, feel, visual observation and perhaps comparison to colored stakes or similar physical cues when the desired degree of compaction has been reached. This process is complicated by the frequent addition of new, uncompacted material to the site. Each time new material is placed on the site, the previous compaction work on that area is effectively erased and the operator must start over in compacting that area. Where the site has not been uniformly compacted prior to the addition of new material, or where the material is added to only a portion of the site while the operator is in the middle of a compacting operation, the likelihood that the compacting operation can be monitored and completed uniformly and efficiently is significantly reduced.
For more certain knowledge of the degree to which the uncompacted material and the site in general have been brought into conformity with the desired degree of compaction and desired site topography, a supervisor or survey crew from time to time verifies the amount of compaction and site build-up and manually updates any staking or marking of the site and the site model. Between these occasional verifications the compacting machinery operators and supervisors have no truly accurate way to monitor and measure their real time progress.
Accordingly, even the most skillful and experienced operators can achieve only limited efficiency in compacting a large land site, such difficulty being due in part to the absence of large scale as well as detailed information as to the real-time progress being made in the compaction of the site.